When misery is a legacy

Ece Temelkuran is brilliant and beautiful – but, above all, brave. You have to be brave if you're a Turkish journalist covering Armenia, with genocide, cynicism, and truth shredded over 95 years. Temelkuran writes about Yerevan and Ankara and mutual incomprehension, but she could be writing about Cyprus, Kashmir, Korea, Israel; anywhere that is locked in a timewarp of malign remembrance.

In 1915 Ottoman Turkey systematically killed or deported Armenians; an act of genocide in which up to a million and a half people died. But why does 1915 matter in 2010? It was the question that Temelkuran's murdered friend, the Armenian editor, Hrant Dink, asked, and the question Temelkuran set out to answer. To those who live just over the ludicrously sealed border from Turkey, it matters because that was when the killing began and Armenians became another giant diaspora, scattered from Los Angeles to Paris. It matters because Turkey's still unacknowledged responsibility for those mass murders binds the new, utterly impoverished Armenian state together. It matters because the French part of the diaspora has built an entire emotional theory of nationhood on Ankara's refusal to confront its past and just say "sorry". It matters in LA because genocide means reparations and lawyers and zillions of dollars.

And it matters to us because understanding this distant but strangely potent fury helps us understand something far beyond Ararat, the Deep Mountain of Temelkuran's recently published analysis. She's explaining something that the English in particular can barely comprehend. History for us is a moribund, inert business. It doesn't bring out boiling passions. We've "moved on" so comprehensively that we don't quite recall where we came from.

The world in the shadow of Armenia's deep mountain is different. Sometimes it feels as though the slaughter was yesterday, not sealed in the tales of grandmothers. Why are the stories that survive always filled with pain, Temelkuran asks. Because pain and suffering endures while happiness fades. Misery is halfway to myth. It unites; and, alas, it deludes.

You see it in Cyprus when Greek Cypriots who weren't born at the time of Turkish occupation 40 years ago grieve for their lost homes in the north. You feel it when you talk to Koreans about the cousins they've never met across the 39th parallel. From the Holocaust museum in Berlin to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the past defines the future of the Middle East.

"Remembering takes two," Temelkuran writes. "If there's no one to remember with you, the things you remember never existed, never happened, vanish. A nation can opt to forget en masse." But equally a land can have a memory, "made up not of the recollections of individuals, but of the concerted efforts of a people who have decided to remember".

Armenia, a nation that has decided to remember, is important because it is a template for passion preserved. You can travel the diaspora and dissect its refusal to abandon the causes of 1915 (even though so many ordinary people, interviewed alone, don't really know what it's about any longer, or what would end it). But you can also, if you're wise, try to deconstruct this baffling legacy of leftover pain.

It isn't about what happened in 1915. Nobody alive remembers that. But it's an instant, irresistible definition of what being Armenian means. It explains, throughout the diaspora, why things are the way they are. It seeks to conclude that nothing can change. And when, as last week, I hear two of the wisest Israelis I know say quietly that, against all odds, these peace talks will succeed, because "we are all so tired, so weary for peace", then the Ararat test is the one to set. Can Jews and Arabs opt to forget en masse?